How many Gabriels Ferraters are there? The poet, of course, but also the critical reader, the mathematician, the linguist, the painting critic… During the centenary of Gabriel Ferrater (Reus, 1922-Sant Cugat, 1972), all of these spheres find their space, but it is reading a biography when this magma can be ordered and try to follow the lines that join them.
In overcoming fear. Vida de Gabriel Ferrater (Tusquets/Edicions 62), Jordi Amat (Barcelona, ??1978) traces the life and motives of a writer who transformed Catalan literature, because “the change in Ferrater’s diction is as brutal as the one they had made Verdaguer or Carner, opened a personal path that many other writers have followed. It has a revolutionary dimension. It is a very strong modernization factor that makes previous poetry age”, he explains.
His first interest was Joan Ferraté, whom he met when he was still studying and was fascinated by his family, by “what was the relationship between them, why they were interested in such similar things, why they read in such a profound way. I was taken aback that nothing had been explained to me about them, and I considered writing a biography of Joan, but ended up discarding it.
Jordi Cornudella, executor of the literary legacy of the Ferraté/Ferrater brothers (and curator of the Ferrater year), commissioned him to write the biography on the occasion of the centenary, also knowing that biographies were the area in which Amat is specializing (in addition to the recent about Alfons Quintà, The Driver’s Son, has written about Luis Cernuda, Roc Boronat, Ramon Trias Fargas, Josep Maria Vilaseca and Josep Benet), and gave him access to numerous unpublished documents. From there, the author has made “a narrative treatment of the biographed character using the techniques of the realistic novel.”
When writing, “there were two questions that I wanted to answer: why is he such a free man of conscience and why when he finally begins to write verses does he arrive with such clear ideas regarding the conception of literature”. For him, freedom “is the result of having been educated in a bourgeoisie, aware that he was the son of a decadent bourgeoisie, and therefore he had enough tools to rise up and be a heterodox among his own.”
The biography reads about a self-taught Ferrater, with profound readings that place him at the heart of the edition of the moment, with the nucleus of Seix Barral, which takes him to international meetings such as the Formentor awards, where “his interventions in the deliberations are brilliant, and it is at the level of the European publishing avant-garde”.
But Ferrater has “numerous problems assuming the responsibilities of an adult life. And to what extent does responsibility file away a life of radical freedom? He decides not to compromise maturity to be who he wants to be, and at the same time he is aware that this distresses him”. Along with love failures, “a depressive impulse that he will not resolve” and alcohol, “a refuge and a destructive trap without which his life cannot be explained.” Nor his suicide, fifty years ago now.
In any case, for Amat, Ferrater “nuclearly is a poet, when he dies he is a poet. I find it fascinating how, dying with only Les dones i els dies, his corpus has been expanding so much. He is a literary being. What is central to his intimacy, aside from love, is literature. With creation, and with criticism, but above all with reading. I tend to think that he would not have published everything that is not poetry, while I am convinced that the work that his brother did in publishing it is essential”.
Catalan version, here
